1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method and apparatus for generating computer applications that utilize information from multiple diverse sources.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
In environments, such as large organizations using multiple data sources, a known difficulty is the accessibility to existing information. Significant amounts of experience or prior knowledge about available data and used systems is required in order to access data, including for example information about customers, employees, sales, inventory, billing, bank accounts and the like. However, even when such knowledge exists, various systems do not necessarily provide compatible interfaces that enable automatic integration of information from multiple sources. Such systems communicate in various and possibly different protocols, and do not always run on the same runtime platforms. When creating data access and integration applications, a known methodology is to model an application once but generate it for various runtime platforms which use different execution mechanisms. For example, a rich client application may run all application logic on the client while using the server only for persistence or state management, while a thin client application may run its entire business logic in the server. The concept of common modeling and separate generation suffers from a number of drawbacks. First, an application may be required to access back end services using different protocols, depending on the specific runtime platform, while keeping the runtime semantics the same for all used platforms. An application may be required to access a service using one protocol at one time and another protocol at another time. Therefore, the protocol used to access back end services must be decoupled from the actual service consumed and from the client platforms. In addition, certain platforms may suffer from performance degradation when using a generic modeling approach, where known optimization techniques may fail to preserve model semantics and are therefore unusable in these scenarios. Thus, in order to maintain the modeling semantics while keeping application performance reasonable, some modeling aspects may also involve modeling of back end services.
In addition, modeling of back end services, and accessing services using multiple protocols and supporting multiple runtime environments require knowledge and skill in computer programming and non negligible effort. These factors necessitate professional computer programmers and time resources in order to efficiently produce applications answering specific needs. In addition, such personnel is not necessarily a content specialist, and needs cooperation with other professionals that possess accurate and up-to-date information about the customers' needs in terms of information and presentation requirements.
There is therefore a need for a method and apparatus that will enable to efficiently construct applications running in different runtime environments and using different protocols to access data from multiple sources. Such method and apparatus should enable a graphical user interface and not require programming skills.